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Law, Objective and Non-Objective

All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know
clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do
(and why), what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they
commit it.

The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to
establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as
well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men
who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If a
society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens,
it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of bloody
private feuds or vendettas.

If physical force is to be barred from social relationships, men need an
institution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an
objective code of rules.

This is the task of a government—of a proper government—its basic task, its
only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.

A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force
under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws.

When men are caught in the trap of non-objective law, when their work, future
and livelihood are at the mercy of a bureaucrat’s whim, when they have no way
of knowing what unknown “influence” will crack down on them for which
unspecified offense, fear becomes their basic motive, if they remain in the
industry at all—and compromise, conformity, staleness, dullness, the dismal
grayness of the middle-of-the-road are all that can be expected of them.
Independent thinking does not submit to bureaucratic edicts, originality does
not follow “public policies,” integrity does not petition for a license,
heroism is not fostered by fear, creative genius is not summoned forth at the
point of a gun.

Non-objective law is the most effective weapon of human enslavement: its
victims become its enforcers and enslave themselves.

That which cannot be formulated into an objective law, cannot be made the
subject of legislation—not in a free country, not if we are to have “a
government of laws and not of men.” An undefineable law is not a law, but
merely a license for some men to rule others.

It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of
strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military
precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the
harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is
not the known that breaks men’s spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship
has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the
incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in
sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically
unable to bear.

An objective law protects a country’s freedom; only a non-objective law can
give a statist the chance he seeks: a chance to impose his arbitrary
will—his policies, his decisions, his interpretations, his enforcement,
his punishment or favor—on disarmed, defenseless victims.

The threat of sudden destruction, of unpredictable retaliation for unnamed
offenses, is a much more potent means of enslavement than explicit dictatorial
laws. It demands more than mere obedience; it leaves men no policy save one:
to please the authorities; to please—blindly, uncritically, without standards
or principles; to please—in any issue, matter or circumstance, for fear of an
unknowable, unprovable vengeance.